Autisme chez des enfants d'immigration récente : modèles explicatifs de familles originaires du Maghreb

Abstract

Cette étude qualitative ethnographique documente les systèmes de croyance et les choix thérapeutiques de dix parents immigrants originaires du Maghreb et ayant un enfant diagnostiqué avec un trouble du spectre autistique au Québec. Des entrevues semi-structurées des parents et une observation participante lors de rencontres de soutien pour les mères ont été effectuées. Nos résultats montrent un tableau polysémique où coexistent des systèmes explicatifs biomédicaux, religieux et traditionnels. Ces différentes croyances influencent les choix thérapeutiques des parents qui font appel à la fois aux approches modernes communément acceptées au Canada et aux thérapies spirituelles ou traditionnelles acceptées au Maghreb. La religion joue un rôle particulièrement important dans l’acceptation de la condition de l’enfant. Une ouverture et un respect face aux croyances des parents et leurs choix thérapeutiques sont des éléments-clés pour faciliter l’alliance avec ces derniers.

Enacting autism: Immigrant family negotiations with nosology in practice

“…The empirical material of the present study on EMs reveals that environmental causes (including issues related to immigration) and biological causes were often mentioned as being associated with the child's problem, while spiritual causes were less often at the forefront. In a similar study, conducted in the same neighborhood as the present study with North African mothers of autistic children, the parents' EMs were different, in that all of them offered some form of spiritual explanation and a significant number were using traditional forms of healing together with Western biomedicine (Ben-Cheikh & Rousseau, 2014). There are two important differences between the two studies.…”

“…Second, although the interviewers consisted of female psychiatrists in both studies, in the present study the interviewer was from Brazil and her mother tongue is Portuguese. She interviewed the families (whose native language in many cases was neither English nor French) either in English or French; while in the study conducted by Ben-Cheikh & Rousseau (2014) the interviewer was Tunisian and she shared the same native language as the participants she interviewed. This strongly suggests that semi-structured interviews are dialogical processes that need to be situated within the context of specific interactions, facilitating the sharing of some meanings and silencing others.…”